Our Society Is Truly Moving Past Racism

It might seem strange to read a headline like that, given the constant talk about racism, but I think the case can be made. If, after all, we have reached a point where virtually everything one could possibly say is racist, then voila!, nothing is racist – problem solved.

The latest evidence is from the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point which has posted a guide to 'Racial Microagressions' on the university website. The following statements are cited as examples of racism:

“America is a melting pot.”
“There is only one race, the human race.”
“I believe the most qualified person should get the job.”

It's also amusing that “Overabundance of liquor stores in communities of color” is an example of racism. I presume owners of liquor stores (or other types of retail) open, close, or re-locate their outlets based on how much business they get. But I guess that's too-free market an idea for academics to deal with.

Jefferson Davis to Get the Heave-Ho in Apache Junction

Some stretch of highway in AJ is apparently going to be renamed.

Gov. Doug Ducey says he'll have the state transportation department review the name of a highway memorializing the Confederacy's president, Jefferson Davis.
Ducey said Friday that he'd like to see those stretches of highway renamed after Arizonans. 

Rep. Reginald Bolding earlier this week called for a highway marker on U.S. 60 in Apache Junction that bears Davis's name removed and the highway renamed. He said honoring supporters of slavery isn't right.

I don't have a strong feeling about this – or to put it more bluntly: “Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn.” In part that may be because I never knew there was such a highway designation. It's also hard to see what connection ol' Jeff has to Arizona (or to Apache Junction).

I threw in the Gone With the Wind quote since some folks think we should ban that, too.

Flag Controversy

Apropos the recent controversy about the Confederate flag, someone dug this up from twenty-plus years ago:

How Not to Start a Campaign

Unless you're a politics junkie, you may not have heard about Loretta Sanchez's strange behavior over the weekend. I had heard about it, but that's me.

Sanchez is a Democrat and a member of the House of Representatives from California, and had just announced her candidacy for the Senate a few days before.

As I said, I had heard about it, but today I finally saw it.

She was already considered an underdog, but now ...

Asian-Americans File Suit against Harvard

Upon more careful reading, it isn't a suit, it's a complaint filed with the Departments of Education and Justice. In any case, here's the part quoted at the link.

Over the last two decades, Asian-American applicants to Harvard University and other Ivy League colleges have increasingly experienced discrimination in the admissions process. Many Asian-American students who have almost perfect SAT scores, top 1% GPAs, plus significant awards or leadership positions in various extracurricular activities have been rejected by Harvard University and other Ivy League Colleges while similarly situated applicants of other races have been admitted. Because of this discrimination, it has become especially difficult for high-performing male Asian-American students to gain admission to Harvard University and other Ivy League colleges. 

My guess is that the in the current administration, this will go nowhere. The idea may be to have it in place for the future.

The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll

This song came up on my mp3 player while I was driving today.

I was struck by the irony of it -- not funny, haha, irony; irony can often be sad and even bitter. The song is about a brutal, racially-motivated crime that occurred in Baltimore on my sixteenth birthday -- February 9, 1963. And I was listening to it as a 68yo man and it made me think, of course, of the events of the past few weeks in Baltimore. The similarities and contrasts made me think of how far we've come in my lifetime -- and, sadly, how far we have to go.

According to Wikipedia, the verdict came down on the day of Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech. Dylan had attended the speech and read about the case on way back to New York.

The album was released in early 1964, and I spent most of 64-65 listening to it and similar music.

Why I'm White

There's a new study that details how Europeans evolved to have white skins. Apparently it happened relatively recently in evolutionary terms -- e.g., within the last 8000 years or so.

The modern humans who came out of Africa to originally settle Europe about 40,000 years are presumed to have had dark skin, which is advantageous in sunny latitudes. And the new data confirm that about 8500 years ago, early hunter-gatherers in Spain, Luxembourg, and Hungary also had darker skin: They lacked versions of two genes—SLC24A5 and SLC45A2—that lead to depigmentation and, therefore, pale skin in Europeans today. 

But in the far north—where low light levels would favor pale skin—the team found a different picture in hunter-gatherers: Seven people from the 7700-year-old Motala archaeological site in southern Sweden had both light skin gene variants, SLC24A5 and SLC45A2. They also had a third gene, HERC2/OCA2, which causes blue eyes and may also contribute to light skin and blond hair. Thus ancient hunter-gatherers of the far north were already pale and blue-eyed, but those of central and southern Europe had darker skin. 

Then, the first farmers from the Near East arrived in Europe; they carried both genes for light skin. As they interbred with the indigenous hunter-gatherers, one of their light-skin genes swept through Europe, so that central and southern Europeans also began to have lighter skin. The other gene variant, SLC45A2, was at low levels until about 5800 years ago when it swept up to high frequency.

Europeans being relatively tall happened about the same time.

The team also tracked complex traits, such as height, which are the result of the interaction of many genes. They found that selection strongly favored several gene variants for tallness in northern and central Europeans, starting 8000 years ago, with a boost coming from the Yamnaya migration, starting 4800 years ago. The Yamnaya have the greatest genetic potential for being tall of any of the populations, which is consistent with measurements of their ancient skeletons. In contrast, selection favored shorter people in Italy and Spain starting 8000 years ago, according to the paper now posted on the bioRxiv preprint server. Spaniards, in particular, shrank in stature 6000 years ago, perhaps as a result of adapting to colder temperatures and a poor diet.

Even for a non-science guy like me, this is interesting stuff.

Re Discussions of Race at Starbucks

My first reaction was 'Huh?' That still pretty much covers it, since it's very hard to see the point of this.

From a business standpoint, it looks like a loser, since I don't think many people go out to eat or drink hoping to discuss political/social issues with their server. I sure don't.

It's also tough to see how this can accomplish anything real positive about race relations; there's unlikely to be much give-and-take in the discussions – on the rare occasions I've been in a Starbucks, the clientele seems heavily skewed to upper middle-class white twenty- and thirty-somethings whose thoughts on racial issues seem unlikely to differ much from the gender-studies and art history majors who will be preaching to them. Of course, that might well be the point – it could be that this is simply an opportunity for the company to preen in front of its core demographic. Ben & Jerry's has done well with this approach.

There is another possible benefit – some folks who have never visited a Starbucks might be tempted to go there just to have an opportunity to tell the barista to STFU. Hey, companies lay out lots of marketing bucks to get non-customers to try their products, this could be a relatively cheap way to accomplish the goal.

Excising a Cancer from MLS

Great news that MLS has bought out the ownership of Chivas USA. They will take over running the team until new owners can be found.

The former owners were committed racists (and committed incompetents) who were an embarrassment to the league. The team was composed almost exclusively of players who were Mexican or of Mexican ancestry, they ran the franchise as a farm team for Chivas de Guadalajara, and they apparently tried to purge non-Mexican office employees. Numerous lawsuits resulted.

Getting rid of such people is a great step forward for MLS.

Are Americans Racist? Well, Duh!

I often hear/read words to the effect of “the US is a racist country.” My response (sometimes aloud, more often not) is usually, “Yeah, it is, so what?”

It's not, I hasten to assure you, that I don't care about racism, but simply that I don't see any way in which racism in the US is any worse than racism or other prejudices just about everywhere else. And thus I see no reason why the US should be singled out for opprobrium.

(“Everybody else is just as bad” is not, of course, much of an excuse. I'm simply noting that when I hear comments about American racism, they are generally made in a context in which it is implied that there is something unusual about US racism).

I was reminded of this when I read this article about Buddhists in Burma killing their Muslim compatriots. As Protestants and Catholics were killing each other not so long ago in Ireland, or as Hutus killed Tutsis in Rwanda, and as Muslims kill Christians in a number of countries, as Serbs and Croats killed each other in Yugoslavia and both killed Bosnians, and so on. In the US, at least the amount of killing is rather limited these days.

As Tom Lehrer put it:
The Protestants hate the Catholics
And the Catholics hate the Protestants
The Hindus hate the Muslims
And everybody hates the Jews.

Prejudice against 'them' (whether defined by race, religion, ethnicity, class or anything else) seems to be a fact of human nature. I can recall in grade school and high school thinking that the kids in my school were somehow different from (and of course better than) kids in other schools.

I suppose it's possible (but not likely) that someday humans may evolve beyond such things. The best we can do about it in the meantime, I fear, is to be aware of it, so we can be on guard when it creeps into our thinking.

Hollywood Is So Hopelessly out of Touch with Reality

Somebody named Ellen Pompeo (of whom I had never before heard, but apparently she’s in a popular TV show) is upset that a dance number in the recent Emmy show didn’t have enough ‘people of color’.

Ellen Pompeo wasn't a fan of this year's Emmy Awards show. 

The 43-year-old actress says she "was really disappointed" by Sunday's telecast. 

"I didn't see any diversity in the Emmys at all. The Emmys felt so dated to me," she said in an interview Monday. "... That dance number was embarrassing. Did you see one person of color in that dance number?"

Not that this sort of thing is worthy of any attention at all, but it brings to mind two points.

One is the habit the left variety of wingnuts has of defining ‘diversity’ solely in terms of skin color (and, sometimes, gender). They have zero interest in any other form of diversity (e.g., diversity of thinking, opinion, religion, etc). I doubt that there were many Republicans or fundamentalist Christians dancing onstage, either, but Ms. Pompeo is unlikely to care about such things. (Nor do I, for the record – I hope the producer simply chose the best dancers).

The other is the incredible pettiness of the thing. If one is genuinely concerned with diversity, however defined, aren’t there areas of life more worthy of such concern than the Emmys?

PC Isn't Totally New

We’ve all seen dozens of pictures like this poster – advertisers are especially fond of them. Of course they are absurd and laughable in their pathetic attempt to offend nobody and include everybody. In addition to the omissions noted, I see they're missing the handicapped physically-challenged person.

But they also remind me of another, much earlier effort to be ‘inclusive’ (though less inclusive than today). I’m thinking of those great old World War II movies where at some point Sarge would call roll for the squad, and it would be something like, "Kowalski ... Garibaldi ... O'Malley ... Goldberg ... " and so on.

Of course, the Army wasn't integrated yet, or the list would surely have included a black guy named, no doubt, Washington. No Asians, either. Sometimes there might be a Hispanic, generally named Martinez; he’d be from Los Angeles. That’s because they were also aiming for regional inclusiveness -- there was always a guy from Brooklyn, a southerner, and a ridiculously naive farm kid.

Great stuff.

Chattanooga Choo Choo

I just learned that Glenn Miller’s Chattanooga Choo Choo was the first golden record. It was introduced in the movie Sun Valley Serenade and reached #1 on December 7, 1941 (I think that date has some other significance as well). It stayed #1 for nine weeks.

I doubt that it could be released today, because of the opening lines:

"Pardon me, boy, is that the Chattanooga Choo-Choo?" 

"Track 29!" 

"Boy, you can give me a shine."

The record sold 1.2 million copies. I have the Andrews Sisters’ version on my mp3 player.

A Write-In in Detroit

A write-in candidate, a guy named Mike Duggan, appears to have finished first in the Detroit mayoral primary (there will be a run-off between the top two finishers).

Write-in campaigns are always difficult. But how the heck do you do write-ins in a city with 47% functional illiteracy?

And on top of that, Duggan is white. Amazing.

The Day Bear Bryant Thanked the Opposing Coach for Beating Alabama

A few days ago, when I was writing this item, I did a little research to see if I could find out when various colleges first integrated their football teams. I didn’t find much, but this story came up.

Sam 'Bam' Cunningham

It’s an interesting story overall, and the experiences of the first black player in the ACC were very sad. But the part I found most interesting comes near the end. The University of Alabama (where football, you may be aware, is taken fairly seriously) was a holdout, although their revered head coach, Bear Bryant, wanted to recruit black players.

In 1970, the opening game of the season was against Southern Cal, which had an all-black backfield. One member of that backfield, playing his first college game that day, was Sam Cunningham, who went on to a stellar career in the NFL and a spot in the College Football Hall of Fame.

USC beat the crap out of Alabama, winning 42-21, with Cunningham having a great first game, gaining 135 yards on only 12 carries, and scoring two touchdowns – in the first quarter.

After the game was over, Bryant said to USC head coach John McKay, “I can’t thank you enough for what you did for me today.” 

The next season, Alabama had its first black player.

Zimmerman v. NBC

The US media in general disgraced themselves in the Zimmerman case, but NBC was by far the worst of the lot. Here's the version of Zimmerman's call to the police that NBC broadcast on the Today show:

Zimmerman: This guy looks like he’s up to no good. He looks black.

Sounds pretty bad, doesn't it? It clearly supports the idea that Zimmerman was a racist, and that he thought Martin was 'up to no good' because he was black.

Here's the full text of that portion of the call:

Zimmerman: This guy looks like he’s up to no good. Or he’s on drugs or something. It’s raining and he’s just walking around, looking about. 

Dispatcher: OK, and this guy — is he black, white or Hispanic? 

Zimmerman: He looks black.

Reads a bit differently, doesn't it? Now, Zimmerman's concerns are based on Martin's behavior, not his skin color. He brings up race only in response to the dispatcher's question.

Last year, after the doctoring of the tape was made public, and Zimmerman's lawyers complained, NBC didn’t even bother to try to defend their indefensible lack of journalistic ethics, they simply said, effectively, “So what? You’ll never collect damages.”

NBC Universal Media responded to the Zimmerman complaint by noting that other media outlets played up the racial angle of Zimmerman’s deadly encounter with Trayvon Martin. 

The company also noted the pivotal nature of the second-degree murder case: “[I]f Zimmerman is convicted, that fact alone will constitute substantial evidence that the destruction of his reputation is the result of his own criminal conduct, and not of the broadcasts at issue which, like countless other news reports disseminated by media entities throughout the country, reported on the underlying events.”

This is based on the fact that, in the US, a person can collect for defamation of character only if he has a reputation that could be defamed. A convicted murderer would have a hard time convincing a jury that he had suffered any damage by being called a racist.

But now that point is moot, and my guess is that Zimmerman could now convince a jury that NBC, in its falsification of the recording, had deliberately caused him a great deal of damage (the fact that the action was intentional rather than accidental will likely make things much worse for NBC).

I’ll bet NBC’s lawyers are trying to figure out a good starting point for the settlement negotiations.

A Bit of Sun Devil Pride

There is little to make one proud in the world of professional sports, nor in putatively amateur college sports. There are many times when I question whether being a sports fan gives me a shared responsibility for the disgusting sleaze and corruption that permeate that world, in that the fans are the enablers of the whole mess. I’ll leave that discussion for another day.

I can’t say that my alma mater and favorite sports factory, Arizona State, is any better than any of the others. I did come across one moment in its history, however, that is worth celebrating (though we have to go all the way back to the year of my birth to find it).

In 1947, the Arizona State College Sun Devils* had two black players on their football team (the first black player had played for ASC in 1937**). These players were not allowed to play in games against West Texas A&M (now West Texas State) nor Texas Mines (now UTEP) because officials at those schools “do not feel they can be responsible for actions of spectators.”

After that season, ASC dropped the two schools from future schedules and refused to play them (or any other such schools) for several years. In the early fifties the two schools changed their racist policies. ASC was also the first team with a black player to play at the University of Arkansas (in 1951).

One of the players that the Texas schools refused to allow on their fields, Morrison Warren, went on to become Phoenix’s first black city councilman and eventually vice-mayor, as well as president of the Fiesta Bowl. I remember him as a leading citizen during my youth.

*As an aside: 1947 is the first full year the school’s teams were called ‘Sun Devils’ – the name was changed from ‘Bulldogs’ midway through the 1946-47 school year.

** UofA did not have any black players until 1949.

The Experts Agree with Me

Of course they do – if they didn’t, they wouldn’t be experts, would they? They would be "the so-called experts."

I’m certain that I have been less exposed to the Zimmerman/Martin case than most Americans. I guess there it was pretty much nonstop coverage; here I’ve just read those news articles that seemed interesting.

My reading of the trial testimony indicated that the prosecution case was very, very weak and came nowhere near proving Zimmerman guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. This trial wrap-up from the Miami Herald agrees strongly:

After five weeks of trial and 56 witnesses, few legal observers believed prosecutors came close to proving Sanford neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman committed second-degree murder when he shot and killed Trayvon Martin in February 2012. 

So for many legal analysts, it was no surprise that jurors rejected even a lesser “compromise” verdict of manslaughter, acquitting Zimmerman outright of all criminal charges and deciding he acted in a reasonable way to protect his own life. 

The acquittal was a stinging blow for prosecutors and their decision to file the second-degree murder charge against Zimmerman, who was not initially arrested by Sanford police after claiming self-defense. And it was a resounding embrace of the defense’s strategy during closing arguments not just to establish that prosecutors hadn’t proven Zimmerman guilty, but also to show he was “absolutely” innocent.

Given that experienced attorneys, the police who investigated, and most important of all, me, are in agreement that there was pretty much no case against Zimmerman, one has to wonder why the case even went to trial. But I think we all know the answer to that – it was in Barack Obama’s political interests to stoke up racial animosity during his re-election campaign.

As something of an aside: The prosecutor who overrode the police and filed the flimsy murder charge, has now fired a whistleblower in her department who revealed that she was withholding evidence.

An employee of the Florida State Attorney's Office who testified that prosecutors withheld evidence from George Zimmerman's defense team has been fired.

The guy had found that a large amount of data from Martin’s cellphone had been deleted from files provided to the defense, and testified about it.

A Question about Border Enforcement

If the president can choose to enforce some provisions of new laws, while not enforcing others – as he has done with the Obamacare bill – why should we believe that he will enforce the border control provisions of the immigration bill?

Wouldn’t it be much more likely that he will enforce the ‘path to citizenship’ portion vigorously, while totally ignoring anything resembling border control?

After all, the point of granting citizenship (sorry for being so cynical) is that Hispanics mostly vote for Democrats.* Having achieved the goal of adding ten million or so new Democrats to the voter rolls, why then would he wish to do anything that keeps out future Democrats?

Regarding the first paragraph, here's a law professor arguing that the president can't, in fact, refuse to enforce laws when it's inconvenient to do so. I would think that was self-evident, but he's getting away with it, isn't he?

The core of the argument is that the Constitution (Article II, Section 3) says that the president "shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed." Note that it says 'shall' not 'may'.

*The Republicans who support the bill have been quite open that the reason they do so is because they hope Hispanics will then start voting Republican more often. Neither party cares much about the right/wrong or good/bad of the proposal.

Race in Period Literature

I was reading a favorite blog about mystery books (The Passing Tramp) the other day, when an author I’ve read a few times came up in regard to a delicate subject. The author is Leslie Ford (real name: Zenith Brown), and the subject is race – specifically, negative depictions of racial minorities (blacks, in this case) in books from another era.

The Tramp points out that at least one publishing firm specializing in reprints of Golden Age mysteries refuses to touch Ford’s books:

There are those like Leslie Ford, whose ubiquitous and unconscious racism automatically eliminates her from our consideration [for republishing], customer requests notwithstanding.-- Tom Schantz and the late Enid Schantz of Rue Morgue Press

I’ve only read two books by Ford, All for the Love of a Lady and The Bahamas Murder Case. We will eliminate Bahamas quickly because I don’t recall that there were any black characters in the book. All for the Love of a Lady I read a couple years ago, so forgive me if my memories are hazy.

It was set in Washington (as were many Ford books, apparently) during World War Two. I remember enjoying immensely the insights into the thought processes and practices of the era – victory gardens, trading ration stamps, upper-class people discussing the adventure of riding buses, etc. As a mystery, I recall it as mediocre. As the title might indicate, it was almost as much a romance novel as a mystery, with much of the attention focused on saving the marriage of the couple at the center of the mystery.

But we are here today to discuss race. Ford’s characters are upper-class Washingtonians – all have servants, the servants are black, and the depictions of them, while not nasty or excessively negative, are very patronizing and condescending. Reading the passages of conversations between the central characters and their cooks and maids had me shaking my head in dismay on a number of occasions.

And yet – the book is a product of its time. As nearly as I can determine, using other books and movies as my guide, as well as memories of my own childhood ten or fifteen years later, the depictions by Ford of white attitudes are accurate. I wouldn’t want it any other way.

And if the author shared the attitudes of her characters (as it seems likely she did)? Then shame on her. She was hardly alone, but as the Tramp points out, some people were already beginning to call for change.

Look at the uproar in 1939 over the refusal by the Daughters of the American Revolution to allow Marian Anderson to sing at Constitution Hall.  First Lady Elanor Roosevelt resigned her D. A. R. membership over this shameful exclusion.

But I don’t see why that means her books should not be reprinted, read, or enjoyed. There are a great many authors and artists whose private lives or political/social views one might find offensive. Ezra Pound was a fascist, and a damned fine poet. I don’t let Wagner’s anti-Semitism get in the way of my enjoyment of his music.

But, as an artist, Leslie Ford is not in the same category as Pound and Wagner. Her books are, the little I have read, enjoyable, but nothing great. If she ends up forgotten, it will be unfair, but there are so many other good mystery writers of that era that the loss will not cause me any sleepless nights.

Still, if I come across any of her books in used book stores, I will snap them up, and will read and enjoy them without an ounce of guilt.